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"I see you’ve written extensively - but how would you deal with a prolapsed cord, nuchal cord, hemorrhage, complete dystocia, premature birth? Are you willing to go to the hospital for those? What about monitoring for incompetent cervix, gestational diabetes or preeclampsia?

Mrs VS"

This is not an "ignorance" movement. We are a group of mothers, largely supporting each other on the web in various chat rooms and web discussion boards, that is actively looking to MITIGATE those problems that you just outlined. Mitigation is the key to Provident Living.

Mitigation What I have done is systematically looked at everything that can possibly be mitigated by knowledge and then put it into practice. At some point you have to say enough is enough, women have been giving birth for thousands of years and the species has survived and let it go and get into a faithful place. But for me my mitigating efforts have largely focused on nutrition and deep tissue cleansing of my liver to prepare for childbirth.

Gestational Diabetes is the red headed step child of modern medicine - Emperor has no clothes

And toxemia is a disease of malnutrition. Preventing eclampsia : an interview with Tom Brewer, MD

Not every women would feel comfortable giving birth at home, not to mention doing her own prenatal care, but I do, and I have tried to come up with a model of living that will ensure to the greatest extent possible a beautiful outcome.

And no, I am not willing to go to the hospital for those things. I feel that most of prenatal care is fear based cover your butt type of testing, and barring a justified c-section situation like a prolapsed cord or placental abruption, I would not go to the hospital to give birth. I have two women in my aquaintance who gave birth with an abrupted placenta and a nuchal cord however, and despite some hairy moments and a bloody mess during the placental detachment, both mother and child did fine in those two unassisted birthing situations. I also am intimately aquainted with moms who have given birth to 12 pound babies at home no problem, and one gave birth to an eleven pound footling breech.

Prematurity? that would be the biggest baby killer of them all with an emergency situation because prematurity can be caused by dehydration and too much adrenaline in the mothers body and both of those situations would be present for everyone during a huge terror or natural disaster event.

However, some of the most damning studies that have been done regarding prematurity have been those countries where NICUs do not exist and the mother is encouraged to put her preemie to breast in a kangaroo care incubator and those babies have just as good outcomes as our american babies without all the bells and whistles of our NICUs and the million dollar price tag for the family and society.

I don't claim to have everything figured out, but I have spent the past 18 years thinking about emergency childbirth and putting into practice what I have learned in my own family life.

I'm grateful for a paper's willingness to share more about our lives, even if they don't tell all of the reasons why we traveled down this path.

Here is a UK Guardian article that showed up this week as well on this topic Going it alone

Jenny